We’ve had an email from Dom, saying:

I just rescued a set of dining room chairs from a skip. With a bit of a sand and coat of paint, two of them will be fine for use in my kitchen but the other two are broken. The supports under the seat have broken on one and the frame of the back on the other. Any suggestions?

Like with broken electronics and the like, I’d suggest giving fixing them a go because, at the end of the day, you’re not unlikely to break them any further and if you do, you won’t really have lost much (start with a broken chair, end with a broken chair) but might have learnt something along the way which will help you next time. (Or, if you know someone who likes fixing stuff, see if they’ll do it since they might be able to get them as good as new.)

We have a rickety old chair in the bathroom for throwing our clothes on – broken ones might be sufficient for that type of job – and we have a bizarre, stylised metal-frame one (which we inherited when we bought the house) in the garden and put plants on the seat: they’ve got room to trail and to climb and are out of the evil clutches of slugs too.

Any other suggestions?

(Photo by _H_)

We already know what to do with narrow-necked glass bottles like those used for beer or lager and plastic screw-on caps, but what about the metal bottlecaps?

Like so many little random things, these lids seem infinitely usable – I just can’t think of many ideas to use them up.

Any suggestions?

(Photo by trelin)

Like the post I did about joysticks, I’m not sure whether this one was actually a suggestion or another spam message.

I got an email from one Bradley Boericke with the subject “wetsuit” but without any explanation text (or text at all) in the message itself.

But whether it’s a genuine question or a really, really obscure way to sell me penis enlargement pills, it’s a good question: how can they be re-used or recycled?

I suspect, like swimsuits, they have a tendency to degrade at key pressure spots and in order to keep those key pressure spots covered up (since they’re usually the bits that people like to have covered up), you have to replace the whole suit even though the vast majority of it is still in a good condition.

So ideas? And also any suggestions for lengthening their lifespan?

(Photo by simmo333)

We’ve had an email from Sara R, asking:

What can I do with plastic forks? I always used to carry a proper one in my bag so I didn’t have to pick one up when I got a pasta pot for lunch but now the forks are inside the pot so I can’t refuse them. I’ve now got a stack of little forks that I don’t know what to do with. I reuse or recycle the pot itself but I don’t know about the forks.

Wikipedia informs me that plastic cutlery is usually Polystyrene – type 6 plastic – and that can’t usually be recycled easily so I guess we’re looking at reuses.

I guess they could be melted/moulded into jewellery or some of the other suggestions we had for metal cutlery but any plastic specific ideas?

(Photo by asolario)